Chuck McCullagh's views from Manhattan on magazine and publishing technology.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Graduation Speech I Have Not Yet Given

I’m glad to be speaking today at Keats College of
the North, where five hundred English, philosophy, and history majors are set
to be knighted and sent out into the Great Unknown.

Good luck. You
have probably wasted at least four years of your lives and are in debt, on
average, about $40,000 dollars. And
by-the-way, your student loan rate will be doubled to 6% in June unless the
Congress finds its courage. Get used to
the 6%.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a BS in English education, an MA in
Literature, and a PhD in Philosophy with a concentration in literature. I think everyone should be deeply rooted in
literature, philosophy and history. The
current social media discourse indicated how vital this need is. I have never lost my love of literature,
especially poetry. I’ve published my
share of books and critical articles for the journals. I just completed a course about Rilke’s “Duino
Elegies” and his “Sonnets to Orpheus,” given by the Jung Foundation in New
York. I just finished an epic,
book-length poem, “The Archetype of the Gun.” The itch never goes away.

So what you have learned at this fine college will
likely be with you and nourish your soul for the rest of your life. Well, that’s something. You might decide to stand off to the side at
cocktail parties raging against the inanity of Twitter and the utter insanity
of Yahoo!, buying Tumblr because everyone knows the content on this platform is
long but vapid and mainly pornographic. Vent
a little. You will still have Keats and
Shelley to keep you warm.

I received my PhD more than thirty years ago. I did everything right. I aced my oral and written exams. Wrote a blockbuster dissertation that no one
read: “Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois
Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor.” I received a number of two-year job offers in
Michigan, Washington, and Indiana. Even
then, full-time university positions in the humanities were beginning to dry
up. Then my son was born, and I didn’t
want to drag a family around the country chasing short-term jobs with little
prospects for tenure. So I took a job
with a media company and started over. My
first assignment was to research the health benefits of fish.

That is no fish story. And my lot was so much easier than yours is
likely to be. Recently New York City Mayor
Mike Bloomberg suggested, to the anticipated roar of disapproval, that high
school students might be better off learning to be a plumber rather than going
to college.That seems good advice. Having lived in the Bronx, I know that finding
a plumber is harder to find than dope.

If you think that’s insulting, not the dope,
consider the Op-Ed piece written a few weeks ago in the WSJ by Kirk McDonald,
president of PubMatic, an ad tech company in Manhattan. His piece tells the tale: “Sorry, College
Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.” McDonald
introduces himself as your next potential dream boss. “I run a cool, rapidly growing company in the
digital field, where the work is interesting and rewarding. But I’ve got to be honest about some
unfortunate news: I’m probably not going
to hire you.”

The bearer of bad news is certainly not suggesting
that you have goofed off during your college years. This is Keats College of the North, after
all.In a way, the fault, my friends, lies not in
you but in the stars. Or in the
educational establishment that has not prepared you for a world where science,
engineering, technology and math are king.

But good news, McDonald has a simple way that you
can beef up your resume, stand out from the crowd, and get in his front door: learn computer code. He doesn’t mean you need to become a
programmer—God forbid. McDonald is
suggesting that “If you want a job in media, technology or a related field,
make learning basic computer language your goal this summer.There are plenty of services—some free and
others affordable—that will set you on your way.”

So instead of going to the beach this summer, “Get
acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of
Python.” When you become acquainted with
a couple of programming languages, move that skill to the top of your resume. The world awaits you.

You might take some comfort in knowing that this
prescription also applies to many who have been in the workforce for decades,
including yours truly. For at least
fifty years, media executives tended to have a liberal arts education and that
was quite sufficient. After all, a
liberal arts education usually ensures someone can write, research, analyze,
and draw strategic conclusion. And these
abilities readily find a place in the business setting.

However, the disruption of the media space is
unrelenting and anyone wanting to advance in the media field or even keep her
job better enjoy a high Digital IQ and understand the technology and analytics
that reside underneath that beautiful User Interface. As McDonald nicely puts it, “Unless you
understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you
are familiar enough with the principles of coding to know how the back end of
the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably
wrong.”

You’ll recall the first line of Keats’ poem “On First
looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “Much
have I travelled in the realms of gold.” Hold that thought and that line. It will make you spiritually rich.